


studying romances

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: POV Female Character, Shitty's a dick, it's a situation, post 'taddy tour'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 21:14:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6582670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Up close and personal—and this is what Lardo had wanted to say, when asked—he’s kind of an asshole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	studying romances

**Author's Note:**

> i'm worried abt my girl
> 
> title from 'campus' by vampy weeks-- how am i supposed to preteeeeeeend that i never wanna see you agaaaaain
> 
> shittybknights.t.com

Lardo gets back to Samwell and she braces herself for it but it still sucks anyway. It follows her around, a raincloud, a comic-book bad-mood cloud putting a soggy damper on everything, even the things she felt excited about. The weekend she gets back is a beautiful one, bright August light and fresh apple pie and Ransom flinging his arms around her when she gets out of the car and shoving a beer into her hand. Her brand new bedroom, half-decorated and already untidy and the best place in the world to live, no more sharing sleeping space even if she and Chowder have to share a bathroom.

And it sucks.

Lardo unlocks her bedroom door and dumps her stuff on the bed, opens up the window to pull some light into the room. Moving in at the end of last year consisted mostly of dumping boxes and canvases in the closet and hanging up a bunch of posters, so she makes the bed and starts opening dresser drawers to store shirts and leggings. She finds a glass pipe, blue with little ceramic ladybugs on it, in the top drawer, abandoned. The nice thing to do would be to stick it in the mail destination Boston, but she doesn’t. She just scowls and shoves a handful of clean underwear in the drawer.

 

 

 

 

“How does that kid know so much about the team anyway?” Lardo’s keeping watch while Ransom and Holster shovel dining hall chicken tenders into the plastic bag lining her biggest purse; it’s Friday afternoon and the three of them, united in an unspeakable senior-year fervor of love and rulebreaking, have big plans. Those big plans involve eating as many chicken tenders as they can steal and introducing a round of new Samwell Men’s Hockey players to the Haus rules of Mario Kart.

“My reputation proceeds me,” Holster says smugly, or as smugly as one can when they’re in the middle of upending a plastic tray of chicken into a purse on the sly.

“Nice try,” Ransom says. “He grilled you about Shits, yeah? I think he’s hilarious.”

“He didn’t grill me,” Lardo says, and she knows her voice comes out snappy but can’t really stop it.

“Just had loads of questions, right? ‘Is it true that Jack Zimmermann had to haul a naked guy with a mustache out of a tree one time?’”

“More than one time,” Ransom says. “He probably found Bitty’s Twitter account, because I know Bits tweeted about Shits all the time. How’s he doing, anyway?”

“I think we just got spotted,” Lardo says, and yanks her purse closed. It isn’t even a lie, because the crankiest cafeteria lady who’s working this afternoon has looked their direction and started to furrow her brow, and they do not want a repeat of that thing with the burritos from last year.

“Fuck,” Holster says, at the same time that Ransom goes “Balls,” and Lardo grabs both of their shirt collars, and the chicken, and they make their escape.

They’re walking back to the Haus in safety and freedom when Ransom glances over at her. “Hey man, you okay?” he asks, because he’s the kind of guy who will be juggling fifteen thousand things at once and still notice when you seem a little off.

“Yeah,” Lardo says. “Fine! Just. Senior year, you know?”

“Word,” Ransom says solemnly. “Wanna go get shitfaced and put the fear of God into those frogs?”

“Yeah,” Lardo says, which does make her feel a little better.

She tells herself that it’s not entirely a lie, not really, because it is their senior year and that in itself is strange and huge and reason enough. But it’s not just that.

 

 

 

 

“How’s he doing, anyway?” Ransom had asked, and the truth is that Lardo has no fucking idea, because Lardo hasn’t spoken to Shitty in a solid week which is longer than she’s ever not spoken to him, even when she had just met him or was living in another country.

 

 

 

 

Lardo has a couple of beers and wipes the floor with Holster, Dex and two freshmen whose names she doesn’t know in quick succession, but her heart’s not really in it so she leaves the game in Ransom’s capable hands and wanders inside. She ends up in the kitchen, watching Bitty put dishes away a little tipsily; he pulls silverware out of the dishwasher and hums along to the music and Lardo’d missed him all summer even though they’d talked practically every day. He’d practically bowled her over when he’d seen her at the beginning of the week, freckle-faced and golden-haired from a summer spent chasing kids around camp in muggy Georgia heat, and Lardo had wanted to blurt out, right then and there, “I have a big problem.”

 

 

 

 

She wants to say it right now too, perched on the counter watching Bitty get down unselfconsciously to whatever song is playing in the background. But she doesn’t. It feels selfish. Bitty is so happy and effervescent he’s practically glowing—it’s being back in the Haus with all of them, sure, a crowd of new people to keep an eye on and the promise of a new season of hockey and a new year of adventures, and Jack.

It’s not Bitty’s fault it happened, not the team or the Haus’s or Samwell’s. It’s hers, really, because Lardo’s life is in essence an enormous cosmic joke.

And Shitty’s. Naturally.

 

 

 

 

Bitty’s elbows land on both of Lardo’s knees while she’s thinking and she starts upright to look him in the eye, his grinning face a few inches away.

“You’re off in your own little world there aren’t you?” Bitty asks brightly.

“Sorry,” Lardo says. “Just been a busy week, you know.”

“Moving in here was a bit overwhelming for me, too,” Bitty says. “And things feel so different without Jack and Shitty around. Though, and don’t you dare tell him I said this, I think you’re a much nicer neighbor. Quieter.”

“I can yell a bit more in the mornings if that’ll help,” Lardo says, and Bitty laughs.

“Don’t you dare. I miss them too.” And Bitty’s face falls a little, so Lardo reaches out and ruffles his hair.

“I know, Bits,” she says, because she does know. Already, and despite everything, it feels like a dull ache right under her ribs, like a missed step on the stairs in the dark. They were such permanent fixtures, Jack and Shitty, on the team and around campus and in this Haus. In her life, really. It’s strange being in the spaces that they used to occupy without seeing them there.

“I’ll split the last piece of this blueberry with you if you want,” Bitty says, like it’s a reflex, and Lardo eyes him for a moment but she agrees. Because it’s Bitty.

 

 

 

 

In Lardo’s experience, it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment that you fall for someone, because by the time that you do it’s already stitched itself into your insides for so much longer than you could have known to even begin to look for it. It snuck up on her. A culmination of a thousand moments that, separated, mean nothing more than just the moments they are but together paint a long pattern of the way her life has been for the last two years. They stick around, inside jokes and late night conversations and that one song the Samwell college station is always playing, the cheapest beer possible and the smell of nasty locker rooms and Freddie Mercury and their matching t-shirts. When did you first notice how your heartbeat feels? How much you like the color blue?

And—and here’s a really good question—how do you back to not feeling that way if you can’t figure out when you started in the first place?

And the really big one—does she even want to?

There’s a hairline crack in the ceiling’s paint above her bed and when she goes to lay down that night she stares at it for a long time, following it with her eyes. She’s never noticed it before now, but it’s her room now, and not Shitty’s. She wonders if Shitty ever noticed it. She wonders if he caused it. She rolls over a little to reach for her phone and ask him before she remembers and—fuck it.

She texts Bitty instead, even though he’s just down the hall, and his response is inconclusive. He’s probably on the phone anyway. Traitor.

 

 

 

 

She knows it’s different, for Bitty. Bittersweet is bittersweet no matter how you slice it but it comes in different flavors. He’s walking around campus thinking about how things were, and what he’s seeing are reminders of how he got to how things are. The campus coffee shop. The hallway between his bedroom and Chowder’s. The ice at Faber, and the banner hanging in the coach’s office announcing the recipient of the 2015 Best Male Athlete Award. All these places have sweetness to them, Lardo’s sure, the memories attached to them still so close, a reminder of who he’s got on the other end of the phone line.

And here she is, her own damn bedroom pissing her off because it didn’t always used to be her bedroom.

There’s a certain kind of pain that comes with moving through the space you used to occupy with someone else—the reading room, the school cafeteria, their spot in the library, that bench near the bridge in the sun, the path between the Haus and her old dorm room—when that someone else is there to share it with you anymore. There’s another kind of pain when you’re angry with him.

Lardo follows the crack in the ceiling with her eyes and thinks about the phone call from Bitty, hours after she’d taken off for home, day drunk and filled with an unpleasant melancholy. She’d expected it to be the Bitty lament she’d been expecting, his resignation aligning with the first days of summer. She hadn’t expected the words he’d practically whispered down the phone line, like saying them out loud would somehow make them less real. It hadn’t happened to her but for some reason knowing what Jack had done had changed everything.

 

 

 

 

That had been the beginning of summer. What a way to begin it—the sweet, insistent promise of _maybe,_ the slow, lazy crawl towards something bigger than you ever expected. That sense had filled her up too, somehow, had pushed her into putting her own thumb on the speed dial just to see.

But that’s summer and this is autumn, and autumn is something else. Autumn is to-do lists and graduation applications, the equipment room, her senior thesis. Summer’s expanses of possibility shiver and fade into autumn’s corners of mystery and worry. In June she’d felt like the chance was still there, drenched in long bright afternoon sun and SPF60. It’s August, still warm out. The edges of September are a long way away, the days still long and temperatures still high. But changing leaves and all-nighters and Halloween are on the horizon, and the last weekend of her summer has come and gone. Sometimes they pass on by without her noticing, changing seasons, but this one had to make itself known.

 

 

 

 

This couldn’t have happened at Christmas, or in February, or September. It had to be the end of summer. If it had been May she would have had time to prepare for it, three whole months to tell herself how things would be going forward. That’s what she had been expecting when the spring calendar finally hit graduation, even if a tiny part of her was holding out hope that something might change if she stood to the side and just wished enough.

But it hadn’t.

And that would have been easier, if it hadn’t, because she would’ve had time to tell herself that of course some of the new freshman had heard stories and of course they’d ask questions because from the outside Shitty Knight is larger than life, he’s legendary in his own way.

Up close and personal—and this is what Lardo had wanted to say, when asked—he’s kind of an asshole.

 

 

 

 

It had been a good summer, too. The kind of summer you dream about. The kind of summer where you do almost nothing but everything feels so vitally important anyway, hushed conversations with late afternoon thunderclouds building overhead, long aimless days spending time together just because you can. She hadn’t thought it would be a good summer, but something about it had been special.

But it ended, because that’s what summers do.

Their last weekend—Shitty moving into a studio place near campus, sarcastically buying her a coffee  mug with the Harvard logo on it, running his hands through his hair and still coming up short three months later. They went to the beach for the day. He drove, and Lardo sat in the passenger seat with the window down and her sunglasses on. Ate ice cream, drank a few overpriced beers, sand where sand shouldn’t go.

They sat in the car in the parking lot outside his place for a while when they got back into town, Shitty idly flicking through the radio stations trying to find something alright to listen to. The sun was down, the windows rolled up and steaming over, and they’d passed a joint and a mostly-empty bottle back and forth for a while because Lardo was taking the bus and Shitty just had to walk upstairs.

“Don’t say anything cliché,” Lardo said, and Shitty laughed.

“Or you’ll waterworks?”

“Or I’ll kick your ass.”

Shitty looked up at her and Lardo watched the shift of his face, the line of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders. His stillness, too—Shitty never sits still, always filled up with nervous energy about something—like he was holding his breath. His hands were braced on both of his knees, strung tight with potential, teetering on the edge. There will never be another moment like this, Lardo thought.

Fear is a funny motivator—the fear of ruining everything and the fear of losing what might be the last chance wage war. One of them won out.

The car radio cackled static, snowy white noise, and the summer air was hot and heavy and it was the last weekend they would see each other in God knows how long, and so Lardo closed the space between them, all humidity and alcohol.

When she kissed him Shitty said her name against her mouth. When he pulled the car door open she almost fell out of it. They stumbled up the stairs to Shitty’s new apartment, unfamiliar floorplan getting in the way, a doorjam in his back, a chair an unexpected obstacle.

Lardo’s hands through his hair—something she’d thought about—and Shitty’s hands on her shoulderblades. The new shapes they made, navigating the geometry of desire, the intersection of what might be and what should be and what is.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” Lardo asked, somewhere before they tumbled beyond any chance of going back, Shitty’s bedroom door flush against his back and his hands on her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes very green and his hair in his face.

Maybe Lardo has a thing or two to learn about asking stupid questions, too. Maybe if she hadn’t said it out loud then neither of them would have had to answer it.

But she had. And they hadn’t listened to their own advice, had instead tumbled sideways through the door and onto the bed, Shitty’s hips under her knees and his hands on her hands, and then it was too late.

 

 

 

 

That was a week ago.

 

 

 

 

She’d left in the morning without saying anything, necessity belaying anxiety (she was running very late for brunch with her grandmother) and then she’d gone back to Samwell, and she’d moved her stuff into Shitty’s room that’s now her room, and she hadn’t texted him. And he hadn’t texted her. She’d heard him on the phone with Bitty in his search for the basement key.

“Do you have any idea what Shits would’ve done with the key to downstairs?” Bitty asked her later. “He swears he doesn’t remember.”

“You’re better off asking him,” Lardo said, and slammed the back door much harder than necessary.

 

 

 

 

It would even have been better if it had ended badly, a trainwreck, because at least a trainwreck has a definitive ending. A clear explosion with smoke, and bodies dragged out of the rubble. This feels like being trapped in limbo, suspended in nothing before somebody cracks and brings the whole thing down.

It would have been better not to know at all.

Maybe.

 

 

 

 

She’s used to him being there, a strange sort of constant. A lever. A place to stand. Even her interest in him is in its own sense a kind of consistency, something ridiculous and entertaining in its absurdity, its unattainability. A funny aside—well, Larissa, you really did yourself over this time, her mother’s voice. Maybe she wasn’t willing to admit how it was changing until she was sitting by herself outside her junior year art exhibit ruining her eyeliner, but even then they’d been able to keep moving forward. Live in something resembling similarity, even though they both knew it couldn’t last.

And now—

 

 

 

 

In bed, in the dark, Lardo picks up her phone again, pauses with her thumbs over the keys. There are things she wants to say but she’s never been good at finding the right words. It’s something she’s always admired about Shitty—his ability to just say what’s on his mind—though of course this time he didn’t and the silence feels as real and as huge as the physical distance between Samwell and Harvard. Lardo takes a deep breath, tries to draw the appropriate lines, the ones that mark where friendship turns into something else, the ones that suggest when you’ve gone too far.

She tries, and that has to count for something. Then again, if she had tried a little bit harder, a little bit less, they might still be sitting on the other side of an invisible line they’ve been toeing for a long time, not knowing how dangerous it might be to cross it.

Maybe the problem is that there isn’t a boundary, with warning signs and a railing to keep you from falling over the edge. It’s something much more abstract, much harder to pin down.

People live with all kinds of things, all the time.

_u didn’t warn me of the seismic fault in the ceiling here_

She types it out, almost deletes it, then hits send before she can stop herself. It’s been a week, and one of them has to, and somehow she knows it isn’t going to be him. Hard to be the bigger person when you’re five-foot-one.

Lardo is about to roll over and try to sleep when her phone’s screen lights up, a blue square in her dark bedroom. She checks it.

_bro thats from my head_

_& the haus’s generally unsound structure, move ur bed maybe_

Maybe she will, Lardo thinks. Move the room around. It’s hers now, anyway.

 _ur an idiot_ she texts back, because it’s as good a time as any to say that.

 _yeah,_ he says, nothing else. Lardo can picture him lying by himself in his new place, and her chest aches like a bruise.

The Haus creaks and wheezes around her, still-warm wind whistling through the open windows downstairs, the air conditioner straining to get going as the night settles in. She can hear Bitty’s music down the hall, and voices from upstairs. It’s all so familiar, at the same time that it isn’t. Shitty likes to joke that the Haus keeps an eye on all of them. Maybe so.

Lardo lets out a breath, surrounded by familiar trappings and four walls, and the hour on the clock kicks over to the next day.


End file.
